Live From New York - James H. Miller [185]
MIKE MYERS:
If Conan’s recounting that, he’s recounting it modestly. My memories of Conan O’Brien are just that he was absolutely supportive, decent, fair, hilarious — the funniest guy in the room. So if he’s saying he was a naysayer at any point, that’s him being extremely modest. He’d always give you great positive encouragement, but he also had a great eye on how to make something better. You always came away with three great jokes that he would give you. He’s a great collaborator and a generous, generous colleague.
As it happens, the first thing I did that went over big with the studio audience was on my fourth show, when I did do “Wayne’s World.” It was what they call the ten-to-one spot, the last sketch of the night. And it went really great. On that next Monday, as I was coming into work, I heard somebody working in the building singing the theme song from “Wayne’s World.” I was like completely blown away, because it had been on at ten to one. But somebody was going, “Wayne’s world, Wayne’s world.” I was like, “Were you in the audience?” The guy goes, “No, no, we saw it on TV.” I go, “Of course.” And that was a really magical moment. The only thing I can describe it as is magic. Just unbelievable.
ROBERT WRIGHT:
Probably my favorite skit was “Da Bears.” It didn’t last that long, but it’s incorrectness was so funny, so crying-out-loud funny. I told Farley and Smigel, who wrote a lot of that material. They’d sit there at the table with heaps of meat, just heaps of meat — it was just so stereotypical — and say, “Da Bears.” It was what made SNL. It just brought tears to your eyes how stupid it was but how real it was. That’s the kind of humor you expect the show to produce all the time. You can’t do that all the time, but when you see it, it’s great.
JACK HANDEY:
There are very few shows on television where writers are not forcibly rewritten. When we would sit around the rewrite table, it was up to the writer whether he wanted to take any changes that were suggested, even if Lorne didn’t like it. I remember I wrote this sketch for Jerry Hall when she hosted. It was called “Sore Toe.” And it was just that Randy Quaid had a sore toe, and the gag was basically all these things that were a danger to the sore toe. Anyway, there was a non sequitur ending where Jerry Hall said something like, “Your father has gone and hung himself.” It was just out of the blue. And it made me laugh and Jim Downey laughed really a lot.
But Mick Jagger was there and just hated the ending, or so I heard. And he was trying to get Lorne to make me change it, and I said, “No, I like it the way it is.” And to his credit, he left it on. Saturday Night Live is one of the few shows where writers really can control what they get on. Of course, you can fight really hard and produce the piece and then it’s cut after dress. But at least if it does get on, you usually control it.
TERRY TURNER:
I remember at one point we were standing at the elevators on seventeen and we had been there for like thirty minutes pressing the button, going, “What the hell’s going on?” Five or six people walk by, and finally somebody walks by — I think it was Al Franken — and he says, “Those don’t run at night.” So it was like you were on your own to discover anything. There was no handbook to figure out how this worked.
GREG DANIELS:
One of the reasons I felt like I didn’t want to go in and talk to Lorne was, when I was there you could see Tom Davis there and Al Franken still being there, and it just seemed like it was possible to spend fifteen, twenty years working at Saturday Night Live. And it’s a really great show and everything, but I was scared that I would end up putting in my whole career there. It’s hard to